Destiny If You May
by Karen Hikari
Summary: "My first decree has already been carried on with," Ben said. "I decided that the first thing I wanted to do as king was to start a program for the children that had been born in the Isle to be brought to live here." "You… you did what?" Mal let out in a low voice. Secrets are revealed with an innocent question as Ben and Mal realize that neither of them has been completely honest.


**Alright, after a very long time I'm finally going back to the Descendants fandom! This is a story that I've been meaning to write and publish since forever ago. It's sweet, it's a tad bit angsty and, mostly, it's just these two cinnamon rolls being dorks together, so...**

 **This is the first Bal and solely Bal story I wirte (mainly because I've kept my mind in Jaylos and nothing else), so I really hope you enjoy it!**

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 ** _Destiny If You May_**

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"Mal, do you mind listening to me rehearse my second decree and tell me what you think about it?" Ben inquired suddenly, after a complete hour during which they had been sitting next to each other in perfect silence. Time, Mal supposed, he had invested in re-reading and editing said declaration.

"Your second decree?" she replied, barely looking up from the sketch she was working on. "Don't you mean your first one?"

"Well, I do mean my first one as _official_ king, crown and everything, but I'm surprised you could have forgotten my actual first one, since it was―"

"What are you talking about? You were crowned two weeks ago and I've been in Auradon ever since and, trust me, I've attended every one of your meetings, I _would_ remember if―"

"Mal, are you serious?" Ben cut her off, raising a concerned eyebrow.

"Dead serious," she answered blankly. "I should be the one asking you that!"

"Don't you… don't you remember?"

"What am I supposed to remember?" Mal inquired, and if her voice seemed to shake at the end, Ben decided not to comment on it.

"Mal, I've been the king of Auradon for a couple of months now, the coronation was a mere ceremony."

"Yeah, I know that, but―"

"My first decree has already been carried on with," Ben continued, not minding Mal's interruption. "I decided that the first thing I wanted to do as the king of the United States of Auradon was to commence a program with which the children that had been born in the Isle of the Lost were brought to Auradon so they could live here."

"You… you did _what_?" Mal let out in a low voice, her fingers dropping the pencil she had been drawing with.

"Wait a minute, you… you didn't know, Mal? For real?" the king inquired, amused. "Didn't they read you guys the declaration? Weren't you asked to sign your agreement to come to Auradon and―" however, Ben never got to finish his questions, as Mal cut his train of thought with a laugh that was almost cruel, almost sinister, the un-felt crackle of someone who knew all there was to expect was disappointment.

"We were supposed to sign our agreement to come to Auradon?" she uttered, an unamused glint of rage in her eyes.

"Well, yes, of course, you and your parents, but―"

"It's true," Mal stated sternly. "No, of course, you wouldn't be lying, you're freaking Benjamin Florian, you don't lie," she continued, as if talking to herself. "And you certainly wouldn't play with me, would you?"

"Mal, please…" the young king exhaled, barely concealing the hurt in his voice.

"Right, Ben, I'm sorry," Mal all but whispered, and though her voice was low, it conveyed her regret―her regret for the distrust that had stained her voice, her regret for the fact that she was incapable of forgetting the first sixteen years of her life and still expected to be deceived by everyone whom she spoke to.

With a small grimace, Ben reached for Mal's right arm.

"Listen, Mal―"

"So it is true, then," the daughter of Maleficent whispered in a defeated tone.

"What is true, Mal?"

"Everything good I have in my life has been given to me by you," she replied in an aplomb-less shrug.

"Come… come here," Ben offered, opening his arms and reaching up to circle Mal's shoulders instead of saying anything, as the loquacity he'd been trained to possess seemed to have abandoned him.

Mal, feeling Ben's arms tighten around her made a move to stand back, stiffening, her whole body bracing up either for a fight or for a retreat. Her preparations, however, came to a stop when Ben gently pressed her face into the curve of his neck, until she was able to inhale the scent of his lotion. Sweet and well-known. Reliable and constant.

"If you're going to tell me that it's not true, I swear I'll punch you," she threatened when she felt Ben breathe in, as if to add something.

"Except it's true, Mal," he replied instead, adding, before she had time to argue: "You being friends with Evie and the boys is an example of a thing in which I had nothing to do with."

"You think?" Mal mocked. "Had we not come to Auradon, 'friends' wouldn't be part of our vocabulary. We would be acquaintances at best, and even that is saying too much."

Giving her lean figure a last squeeze, Ben let go of the daughter of Maleficent and pretended not to notice the way in which she bit her lower lip.

"Wait, Mal, if you... if you guys didn't know about the decree… then how… why did you come?" Ben inquired, suddenly feeling as if the loose ends of their story were starting to make sense.

"We didn't stop to think about it!" Mal argued, making a tiny fuss with her hands. "I thought… Well, it certainly never occurred to me that the perfect, golden king of Auradon had asked _us_ to come live and study in his fairytale land, I-I just assumed that my mother…. I thought Maleficent had some contacts and…"

"Maleficent?" Ben questioned, more than a little confused by the fact that Mal had even entertained the idea of Maleficent having something to do with Auradon's decisions. She shrugged.

"Of course. She wanted the Fairy Godmother's wand―it was merely convenient to receive an invitation for us to come over to Auradon precisely after she had developed her 'flawless' plan to take over your silly kingdom. You didn't see her in the Isle, Ben, you don't know the power she…. You have no idea of what she possessed. What you saw of her? That was a nonentity. She isn't known as the Mistress of Evil for nothing."

Flabbergasted by her own words, Mal stopped with a gasp, blinking numbly a few times before drawing in a shaky breath.

There had been fear in her voice, Ben contemplated miserably, Mal's eyes were turned away from him in anticipation, her long fingers ―the one of an artist, not the ones of someone meant for war― turned into fists, the curve of her jaw stiff with tension.

"Mal, you can tell me to mind my own business, but did you say Maleficent had a plan to break through the Isle's barriers?" the young king asked, squinting. Mal snorted.

"Certainly."

"But… to break the barrier you would have needed the Fairy Godmother's wand… how did she… how did she plan to get a grip of it?"

"Oh, Ben…" the former villainess let out, tracing the king's left cheekbone with her index finger, a smile that spelled 'pity' in her lips.

She had never told him. Through all the months and despite the many opportunities she'd had to confess what they had _really_ meant to doing Auradon… she had never gathered the courage to look at Ben ―sweet, gentle, selfless Ben―straight in the eye and plead guilty to the fact that she had wanted to torn his kingdom and his family apart.

 _Let it be said_ , the daughter of Maleficent thought. _Let him see the kind of people ―of creatures― he brought to his kingdom and then, let whatever punishment we deserve come too_.

"The only reason Maleficent agreed to let us come was because she had a plan. She coaxed the others to let their children come here because of the same reason―Jafar needed Jay to steal for his shop, Cruella had Carlos as her own personal slave and Grimhilde was convinced that she'd marry Evie to a rich prince and then get out of the Isle," she started to explain, her voice a bit too loud to be considered secretive. "Maleficent never gave me chores to fulfill. I could come and go as I pleased, and even if that sense of liberty only came because I was the daughter of the Mistress of Evil, it was better than what they got. And then, one day, she came with a way of shattering the barrier and, you know, conquering Auradon and bewitching your kingdom."

"But… the wand… there's no way she could have―"

"Your magic isn't flawless and, I assure you, the barrier isn't as vigorous as you've been told it is," she snorted. "Carlos broke through it for a brief period of time back when we lived there. Maleficent wanted the Fairy Godmother's wand to destroy it permanently."

"Mal, what are you―"

"Let me finish," the former villainess cut him off, her breaths coming out in a rush. She wanted him to know, she realized numbly. She had never stopped to wonder whether or not if Ben had an idea of what had been their original mission, she hadn't wanted him to, but now that she had started… she couldn't stop. Better yet, she found that she didn't _want_ to do it. "During our stay here we were supposed to get Maleficent the wand. The first night we spent in Auradon we actually went to the museum and tried to… to steal it, but we found out that it was better protected than we had originally expected it to be."

"That's not… that can't be true. There was an alarm in the museum that night, I was personally informed of it, but it was a false alarm, it… The officer even―"

"Your guardian was asleep, Ben. _I_ tricked him into falling asleep," Mal explained, a tiny ounce of exasperation hinting at her voice. "I can't believe you didn't put two and two together. Do you think we weren't intelligent enough to cover after ourselves?"

"Mal…"

"We tried to steal the wand, and we couldn't do it. Let me finish," the daughter of Maleficent cut him off, yet again. "Afterwards, we realized that the only way to come near it was during your coronation. However, even then only your significant other was allowed to be close enough to the wand as to touch it."

"The love potion," Ben whispered, understanding flooding his features, a disappointment so noticeable in his eyes that the daughter of Maleficent _cringed_.

"Indeed," Mal nodded. "The day of the coronation, when I admitted ―better yet, when _you_ admitted knowing about it― to having used a love potion in you, you assumed that I had done it because I had fallen for you from the beginning, while you were dating Audrey or something along does lines. I honestly don't know how you got that idea―I didn't like you, not when I arrived to Auradon, I didn't care about you and much less did I care about your petty kingdom. I solely wanted Maleficent to stop harassing me. I wanted the wand so she would leave me alone."

"But… what happened at the coronation? Did you―?"

"To begin with, Jane wasn't _supposed_ to take the wand," Mal argued. "In the original plan, _I_ took it and then gave it to Maleficent, but… things happened―it started because Jay and Carlos didn't want to leave, because of the tourney team, Evie had Doug and I… I didn't want to leave either," she said with a hitch, her green orbs trained in Ben's.

"Are you saying that if Jane hadn't tried to take the wand for herself you guys wouldn't have―"

"That's not what I said, golden boy. We could have changed our minds at any given moment," she stated, all of her remaining aplomb rolling off her tongue with that sentence.

"You could have," Ben nodded. "Yet, even when Maleficent appeared in all of her dragon glory you refused to help her. You stood by Auradon's side―by my side, Mal. It must not have been easy to go against someone like Maleficent, much less when she looked like a seven-foot dragon."

"It was the least we could have done after all the havoc we'd broken loose here," Mal tried to spite defiantly, though her reply came out as a shaky whisper.

"Mal, please correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand that to brew a love potion one of the ingredients you need is a tear of human sadness."

"Are you insinuating that I'm not human enough to make a stupid potion, because I'll have you know―"

"Mal," Ben huffed. "You know what I mean."

Sighing, the daughter of Maleficent closed her eyes. When she reopened them, instead of the green glimmer that had terrorized her fellow islanders, what shone in her orbs was the meek trace of a plea.

"The first one wasn't mine," she admitted in a low voice, her eyes stubbornly fixed on the wall next to Ben's head. "Or of any of us, for that matter. The second one, though…"

"What second one? You only made one love potion, didn't you?"

"Well, yes, we only made one _love_ _potion_ , but I had to give you the antidote too," Mal admitted sheepishly, a slight blush spreading across her cheeks.

"Why did you even brewed an antidote?" Ben whispered, because of all the things that didn't make sense, this was the only one that he wanted to be answered.

"Because, at some point, I figured that to have you head over heels for me while I destroyed everything you loved was… cruel and ruthless… I don't know."

They stayed in silence for a minute, which then prolonged into two, then five. Finally, Mal spoke again.

"You can say you don't want anything to do with me anymore, you know," the girl offered miserably, with a snicker that was only a reflex reaction. "I'd understand."

"I'm aware I could do that," he said. Mal's breath hitched. "But I'm making my own decisions here, and, in the same way you chose to stay, I've chosen you."

 _Of_ _course_ , the daughter of Maleficent thought. _Of course Benjamin Florian, High King of the United States of Auradon was incapable of telling her to step aside and get the fuck out of his life._ Enough had he done for her and the others already, getting them out of the Isle.

"Mal, do you remember what I told you on our first date, when we were at the lake?" Ben inquired, ignorant to the girl's inner turmoil.

"You mean, after you discovered I was using magic to get your attention?" she deadpanned.

"I told you I was in love with you, Mal, right after I had found out that the love potion was even a thing indeed," Ben continued, his voice just shy of a secretive whisper. "And I asked you if by any chance you felt the same way."

"I answered I didn't know what love felt like," the daughter of Maleficent finally complied, blinking rapidly, her eyes still fixed on the wall behind Ben. "And I may still think the same about love, but―but perhaps what I feel for you is the closest I can feel to genuine affect."

"Mal…" the young king let out, allowing himself to take her smaller frame into his arms once more. "As a matter of fact," he quietly began after a moment of silence. "The reason that the potion struck so strongly was because it wasn't creating new feelings―it was merely making me act on what I already knew I felt for you, reluctant as I was to admit it."

"What in hell are you―?"

"What you did up there was beyond courageous, Mal, even if you don't think it was."

"Excuse me, golden boy, but as far as I understand, courage includes selflessness, and it is no way selfless if you had any ulterior motives for your actions―and trust me, I _had_ ulterior motives to act the way I did."

"If you must know, I'll tell you a secret," Ben offered, pulling back slightly so he could stare down into Mal's eyes. "I wasn't being completely altruistic either ―the reason I was so keen on getting you guys out of the Isle was because I had seen you once, Call it as you wish, a dream, magic― all I knew is that I had seen you, and I had to get you to Auradon."

"Ulterior motives, you, the High King of Auradon?" Mal said, hiding her amusement. "Please forgive me if I don't believe you."

"Well, who knows, I may be talking to the High Queen of Auradon right now, that has to count for something," the son of Belle replied, before he even had time to think over what he had sad and a deep vermilion blush colored his neck. Mal arched an eyebrow.

"We'll see, golden boy, we'll see," she let out with a smile. "But, if you may, I'll admit that I saw you myself for a millisecond, when Carlos broke through the barrier."

"Then we might as well call it destiny."

"You're such a sap, I can't believe you!" Mal cried in exasperation. As all answer, Ben attempt to send a flirting wink her way.

"I won't deny that, but I am _your_ sap and it's too late to back off now," he laughed, intensifying the red of his blush, which only caused Mal to raise both eyebrows at him.

"Shut up before I regret everything I just said," she threatened, which made Ben laugh even louder, wholeheartedly. Lightly. Naively.

"As you wish, then, as you wish," he said, leaning down to press a soft kiss to her forehead. "But I'll have you know that I don't regret anything."

"Please shut up before I throw up," she repeated, rolling her eyes for better effect. Ben, on his side, merely laughed some more. Oh, and what a sound was his laugh, Mal thought to herself, what a sound.

Destiny, if you may, her thoughts whispered as she allowed herself to rest her head on the king's shoulder, her eyes half-closed and Ben's left arm securing her waist. Destiny if you may.

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 **Okay, so how did you like that? Good, bad, should I go back to Jaylos?**

 **Please let me know what you think of this little something by pressing the 'Comment' button (or 'Review', it depends) and _also_ tell me what you think of the new movie? Are you excited? Because I sure am!**

 **Love you all and read you soon!**


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